ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, this book does not attempt to define absurdist literature, but attempts to examine its major and minor players. As such, the field is indirectly defined by examining its constituent writers. Not only investigating the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” this volume wades deeply into absurdist fiction and absurdist poetry, expanding much of our previous sense of what constitutes absurdist literature. Furthermore, long overdue, approximately one-third of the book is devoted to marginalized writers: black, Latin/x, female, LGBTQ+, and non-Western voices.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|132 pages
Origins
part Section 1|91 pages
What Led to Absurdist Literature?
chapter 2|11 pages
Historical Precursors, II
part Section 2|38 pages
Philosophical Origins
part II|228 pages
Absurdist Literature
part Section 3|55 pages
Samuel Beckett
chapter 15|10 pages
Credo quia absurdum est
part Section 4|41 pages
1950s
part Section 5|128 pages
1960s
chapter 29|12 pages
Understanding the Absurd under the Shadow of Late Capitalism
part III|130 pages
Absurdist Legacies
part Section 6|41 pages
Feminist, LGBTQ+, and Multiethnic Absurdist Literature
part Section 7|86 pages
World Absurdist Literature